The Internet and World-Wide Web (the “Web”) have transformed the way people and companies provide and access information. Estimates of the number of web sites available range between twenty and thirty billion. The primary means by which users of the Web navigate and access this massive amount of information is through search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and others.
However, with such a large number of web pages, the likelihood that any one page is provided to an individual entering a search query can vary widely and depend on many factors. Needless to say, web site owners that rely on site traffic, advertising and commercial transactions as a means for generating revenue want their site to appear as often and as “high” in a search result list as possible. Generally, modifying one's web page(s) and online advertising strategy to increase the relevancy and ranking with respect to search engine methodologies is referred to as “search engine optimization”—a practice that has risen from a cottage trade a few years ago to a multi-billion dollar industry. This is no surprise given the amount of advertising-based revenue available through Google AdWords and other similar programs.
Optimizing a website's performance with respect to search engines has traditionally relied on making the page more relevant to the web-crawlers that index the billions of web pages daily, thus increasing its ranking. The web crawlers attempt to “learn” what a page is about by analyzing the URL, the text on the page, links on and to the page, and other page metadata. However, as multimedia content becomes the de facto standard for how to present information on the Web, the ability of a web crawler to “understand” what a web page is about is significantly reduced. As a result, search engines may not attribute a high rank to web pages having significant multimedia content (video and/or audio) even though the content on the page is relevant to a search term.
Conventional approaches to addressing this problem include manually associating topics and tags to multimedia content, either through an editorial process or based on user input. Both approaches have drawbacks, however. Editorially tagging is time consuming and therefore cannot keep pace with the ever increasing amount and rate of multimedia content posted on the Web. Although allowing users to tag content may scale, they only capture a small amount of the content actually covered in the audio/video content. Furthermore, relying on users to tag the content introduces an army of “editors” to the problem, resulting in loss of control, “spam” and tags and topics unrelated to the content.
What is needed, therefore, is a technique for incorporating multimedia content into search engine rankings such that content-rich web sites receive preferable treatment by web crawlers and search engine indexing techniques.